Any Desert Peach plot is an avalanche.  They start slowly, and little by little the inevitable crash will come.

The rocks and snow are all rolling down the mountain-side in this page.

I’m afraid I’m a Victorian writer; I like to set the scene, like Kurosawa does in The Seven Samurai. My work is character-driven, and I’m more interested in seeing who they are than in what they’re doing — until the reader can understand with me why they would do such a thing.  What’s the use of starting a work with a murder if we don’t know the characters?  The writer would have to go back and explain who all these people are, anyway. It just leads to flashbacks and plot-scrambling.

Secrets coming out later are fine in a mystery, as the mystery itself, but turning the plot inside out just to start things with an explosion is just too labored for me. And too bloody obvious.